Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday September 16, 2010 @10:01PM
from the maybe-now-I'll-want-a-player dept.

adeelarshad82 writes "Intel has confirmed that the leaked HDCP master key protecting millions of Blu-ray discs and devices that was posted to the Web this week is legitimate. The disclosure means, in effect, that all Blu-ray discs can now be unlocked and copied. HDCP (High Definition Content Protection), which was created by Intel and is administered by Digital Content Protection LLP, is the content encryption scheme that protects data, typically movies, as they pass across a DVI or an HDMI cable. According to an Intel official, the most likely scenario for a hacker would be to create a computer chip with the master key embedded it, that could be used to decode Blu-ray discs."

"For someone to use this information to unlock anything, they would have to implement it in silicon -- make a computer chip," Waldrop told Fox News, and that chip would have to live on a dedicated piece of hardware -- something Intel doesn't think is likely to happen in any substantial way.

I think we've got a new challenge here! Props to the first person to post an easy hardware/software system for intercepting and decoding HDTV signals.

No hacker is going to give a crap about this. It's so much easier to just rip the data directly from the disk. Plus, anyone in their right minds is usually going to just get the DVD anyways if they are going rip it. Likely going to downsample it anyways since the full resolution file is obnoxiously large. All this realistically would allow for is for people to make an HDMI to Component conversion box which is one of those DMCA grey zones. The underlying technologies of DVD & Blue Ray encryptions were compromised ages ago.

So you record the stream from the player to the display. No big difference.

It's the difference between copying an unmodified MPEG (or VC1) stream at whatever rate your machine can muster, or recording the uncompressed output of such a stream at no faster than real-time.

The former is lossless, smallish, and fast. The latter is lossless only if you can keep up with and store the intense datarate, or is lossy if you recompress it, and it always takes as long to record as the playing-length of the source.

I wonder if we will see a HDCP $YEARNAME format. Oh, your Avatar II Blu-Ray movie has HDCP 2012 on it. It won't work with HDCP or HDCP 2011. Go and upgrade your flash ROM on your display devices? Gee, no upgrade? Time to buy a new BD player and TV!

Not everybody who uses DeCSS is a pirate....some of us just want to watch our legally obtained DVD's from our linux laptops. As a side note does one need DeCSS to read a VOB file then convert to AVI (I've never tried). Or can it be done on a windows computer using a legally obtained DVD codec?

it means that while bd discs still cannot be cracked, the digital data that is being transferred to the device can be tapped and perfect digital copies can be made.

Since HDMI can transfer up to 10.2 gigabits per second of data, I don't think these "perfect digital copies" are going to be made any time soon. 1920x1080x60 + 8 channels of uncompressed audio == lots of bandwidth. More than anyone, currently, wants to store -- it'd be cheaper to buy the movie than buy the storage for a copy of it it, in the case of a direct HDMI lossless rip. And nevermind actually achieving these datarates on any commonly-available storage medium.

Unless, of course, the copies get compressed with something. And then, plainly, they're not perfect anymore.

Much like a gun is a tool. You can use it for target practice, hunting, home defense - and murder. The tool doesn't get to decide how it is used. The user does. The tool is blameless.

Another point. Most people aren't pirates, and most of the people "content protection" screws with are the paying customers. It absolutely is about rights. You buy it - you own it. That's how it used to be. Now the industry is trying to change that. It is important to let those people know they are selling snake oil. That's how I see this event. It's not about a BluRay player for Linux, it's not about piracy. It's about stopping snake oil salesmen from infringing on our rights with these increasingly bogus copy protection schemes.

That's why I love watching things like this happen. I love it when people who are clearly in the wrong (both philosophically and mathematically) get called on their hubris. It fills me with joy.

It's the difference between copying an unmodified MPEG (or VC1) stream at whatever rate your machine can muster, or recording the uncompressed output of such a stream at no faster than real-time.

The former is lossless, smallish, and fast. The latter is lossless only if you can keep up with and store the intense datarate, or is lossy if you recompress it, and it always takes as long to record as the playing-length of the source.

Big differences. Huge, giant, overwhelming differences, in fact.

Maybe I'm missing something here. It seems to me that you don't need to re-encode the huge data stream on-the-fly. The only thing you have really have to do in real-time is buffer the raw data stream to some persistent storage. After that, you can re-encode it however you like at your leisure.

I'm too tired to do the math and calculate how much storage a full Blu-Ray disc stream would require. Whatever it is, though, It only takes one guy with a hard disk array and an Internet connection and the media's toast.

great, then i can stick it on my iPod to watch it, if i have a license to the content. ohh wait, it's a license to watch it from the dvd only? needs to be in readable text on the outside of the case, or you can shove it.

It has already been done, there were HDCP exploits before AACS was cracked which allowed people with DVI/HDMI input cards to make perfect digital copies for reencodes. It took a quite hefty raid array and hundreds of GB of space - and the input cards were rare and expensive too, but it could be done and was done. Or so I read about on a forum I visited;)

They've already had trouble selling HD technology. Were they to just invalidate everything and declare you had to buy new stuff this would not only lead to lawsuits, but just difficulty on the consumer market. If someone already has their TV and Blu-ray player they aren't going to rush out and buy a new one. The content producres will release for what people have, or they'll get no business, thus they'll keep making older formats.

You might notice that DVDs aren't gone, nor for that matter are CDs. The media industry loved the DVD-Audio idea because they had better protection (CPPM) and of course CDs had none. Problem was they couldn't move DVD-A players. Very few people outside of audiophiles bought them. As such the content kept being produced for CD because it was that or have almost no sales.

As I said, Blu-ray is proving to be somewhat of a hard sell as it is, since all it offers is a better picture (DVD offered a ton of better features). If they just said "Nope, you have to buy all new hardware," it would be a total non-starter. People wouldn't buy the HDCP2 players, since they'd have HDCP1 TVs and they'd want them to work. Thus electronics companies wouldn't be interested in selling HDCP2 players. Since people wouldn't have HDCP2 players, you couldn't make discs require HDCP2 or nobody could play them.

Things can be forced on consumers only in certain circumstances. All the encryption on Blu-ray worked because nobody really noticed, it was just a part of the format. Likewise HDCP wasn't something most people encountered problems with only the early adopters got fucked. However you now have a massive installed base of HDCP TVs, and growing every day. Try to screw that over and it just won't work. Your shit won't sell and if it won't sell, companies will stop making it.

"Yeah, and there are five people who legitimately want to back up their blu-rays. So what? You know and I know, this is primarily a tool for piracy."

Maybe he knows and you know. But I don't know. What I do know is that there are whole countries where ripping a DVD for private use is perfectly legitimate. That surely makes for more than five people.

It seems to me that many media companies are in denial about a simple fact--you can't share a secret with a million people and expect them to keep it.

Want to send your account password to your bank? One sender, one trusted recipient, and a world of potential eavesdroppers. That's a problem crypto can solve.

But if the final destination of your precious content is every Joe's TV, iPod, and computer screen, any "encryption" you have between here and there is fundamentally futile. It only takes one of those Joes to start seeding it on BitTorrent, and the more annoying you try make the DRM, the more likely people will be to simply use that as their source instead of paying you.

Besides, after all that work designing and implementing a complex DRM scheme, every single frame of that movie you just sold me is gonna be rendered to my computer's framebuffer. Which gets sent to the display driver. Which is... drumroll... whatever I felt like installing. In theory, I can make my own driver that writes an AVI. So even in theory, DRM is broken.

It's the same kind of denial that leads companies to think streaming video is meaningfully different from just giving me a file to download. If you're sending the bits to my computer, you cannot possibly control what I subsequently do with them.

IMO, the RIAA could make so much more money if they just accepted filesharing as fact and focused on monetizing it. They should look at the bright side--way more people are listening to way more music now than they did back in the day when songs came in plastic cartridges and brick-sized Walkmen roamed the earth. Organize some shows. Sell some merchandise. Sell me a DVD that has awesome-quality 24K soundfiles on it. Get your song on the next Rock Band.

A couple of weeks ago, I went to Lollapalooza 2010. It was awesome, worth every penny of the $180 I paid. How did I decide to go? I found a bunch of the lesser-known artists on Youtube, and liked what I saw. They earned their cash. The record execs, trying to prop an obsolete business model with lawsuits, did not.

Sure, you BOUGHT a disk, a round piece of plastic with no function other than a coaster. If you want to want to watch the movie/install the software/listen to the music contained on it the act of reading that disk is considered your legally binding agreement to the license contained on it. The RIAA and SBA make the bizarre claim that while you can sell the round piece of plastic if you want, the purchaser may never read its contents. Welcome to the bizarro world of software licenses.

It's nothing to do with rights. If you don't like it, don't buy it. That's the only right you have.

You do, however, have the ability to get it, but this violates a government-granted monopoly known as copyright. So the question is: do you have some kind of obligation to respect government-granted monopolies?

An unjust law is a crime unto itself. There is no doubt that the DMCA is an unjust law. The complete ban on breaking encryption is just plain wrong and is a product of lawmakers not understanding technology.

Exactly. I don't own a blu-ray player, I don't intend to ever own a blu-ray player, I don't rip blu-ray movies, I don't intend to ever rip them, I don't download ripped blu-rays (and of course don't burn them, since I don't have a blu-ray burner.

Yet I am thrilled by this news. Why? How does it effect me? I've never played a blu-ray dics, legit or otherwise in my life and never will... so why do I care?

BECAUSE. There is a trend to remove rights from people, to get people to pay multiple times for the same content (the head of the RIAA even admitted in a 1980s interview that they were aiming towards a play-per-play model)

They create artificial scarcity through region codes and corrupt legislation to allow them to sell a product which costs a fraction of a percent of what it used to cost to "manufacture & distribute" while using law & restrictions to force people into paying essentially HIGHER prices for it - and the end product actually has less tangible value and "permanence" than what came before.

All because they determined that there would be higher profits in this business model - but it's an unnatural business model that is illogical and would not WORK, without them purchasing laws to FORCE people to adhere to it.

This is immoral and corrupt, and would never stand in a true free market or for that matter in a socialist one either... can ONLY exist in a corrupted "democracy" and would require draconian police powers to enforce.

This is a blow against that. This is a blow against a propped-up failed business model.

More like this and eventually they will have to figure out a LEGITIMATE business model, or die.

They take advantage of the "global market" to reduce their costs and increase their profits by offshoring production to a society where wages are less, then shipping their product to a society where they can charge more. Using region codes, they prevent their customers from doing the SAME THING.

The customer is NOT allowed to take advantage of the global market by "outsourcing" THEIR suppliers of media by ordering from a different, cheaper region.

This is the ultimate in hypocrisy, this is the ultimate FUCK YOU to their own consumers - we'll deprive YOU of the jobs making your own consumer items, not shit you can do about it - we'll charge you the same as if they WERE made locally, not shit you can do about it... and we'll prevent YOU from going offshore to get the same benefit we do.

You know I sometimes wonder if the world would be a richer or poorer place without copyright, pleanty of things would be different certainly and those who make their money from the current system will of course tell you the world would be a poorer worse off world for it.

It's almost taken as a given that the world would have less creativity without copyright but I do wonder.

If the chef at your local restaurant had to pay royalties whenever he used a recipe published by a celebrity chef would you have a tastier and more enjoyable meal?What if he risked being sued into the ground if he created a derivative work by altering the recipe slightly without a liscence?or would you just have a more bland, unoriginal, uninspired and ultimately vastly more expensive meal.

If your hairdresser had to pay royalties whenever some kid comes in with a magazine picture and says they want their hair to "look like that".Would everyone have far more interesting hairstyles or would it just cost far more and see people getting sued for doing their own hair at home in a copyrighted style?

Both these things are creative and also involve a skill much like storytelling or playing a musical instrument and in both cases I've heard of people trying to get copyright protections extended to cover them.

Imagine a world where in the 17th century someone had decided that recipes and cooking should fall under copyright along with books.You can be sure that were someone to call for it's repeal 300 years later there'd be no lack of "professional recipe composers" who would talk about how much work they put into working out new recipes and the time and effort it takes and how we're bad people for implying that they haven't worked hard and that they somehow don't deserve a cut whenever someone follows their recipies.

of course in a world where we're all free to take someone elses recipe, use it, copy it, publish it or even claim it as our own we know very well that fuck all harm has been done to the industry for the lack of legal protection on such creativity.We live in a world where everyone has family recipes but hardly anyone has family music.

In a world where such legal protections existed and nobody ever knew such an open and unprotected situation as we have in this world it would be very easy to claim that there would be no creativity, no well paid chefs and that setting up a kitchen would be pointless since someone else would just copy the chefs recipes.

Similarly it's taken almost as a given that the world would have less good books, less good stories and less without copyright but try questioning that even for a moment.

Of course no someone is going to complain that composing and cooking a good meal can't be compared to composing and playing a good piece of music because..... well just because!

Those of you who think nobody really backs up their CD/DVD/BlueRay discs for legitimate reasons must not have young children. You have no idea how quickly a team of three year olds can extract the "frisbees" from their cases and distribute them across 3,000 square feet.

Yeah, and there are five people who legitimately want to back up their blu-rays. So what? You know and I know, this is primarily a tool for piracy. Mod me down to oblivion, that changes nothing. I'm not expressing an opinion, just a simple fact.

I'm not the one who has to pretend I'm saving the rights of "The People" or sticking it to "The Man" while I gorge myself on free entertainment.

You obviously dont' have kids. DVDs, or any kind of disk media is just NOT suitable for an entertainment system used around children. Keeping the shiny colourful box and disc out of their reach is the only way. I'd rather spend my time keeping DANGEROUS things out of their reach (like knives) than worrying about having to rebuy my whole collection if the kid somehow gets to them. This isn't the only use case where a backup is a good idea either. The fact that you're so dismissive makes you either a shill or a fool or both.

I would be very hard-pressed to name even one person that I personally know who has never downloaded a movie, a song, or a game that they did not buy.

Really? Most people I know (aside from colleagues) can't even set up their own email, much less know what to do with a.torrent file or a ripper. I think it's safe to say that the GPP is correct, most people are not pirates. You must not get out much/not know many people -- or perhaps you work in a mafiAA-related business?

and it always takes as long to record as the playing-length of the source.

Judging by this I take it you haven't ever encoded a x264 file before. If it could be done in real time frankly I'd be quite happy. Given how it takes about 8+ hours on my quad core machine for 1h of 1080p footage I don't think you'll hear anyone complain.

If the law is so out of sync with reality that everybody find adherence to be too difficult to do, or too invasive to want to abide by, then isn't that an indication that the law is out of sync with reality?

The purpose of art is not the enrichment of media companies, but the recognition of artists. If the entire system requires the militant enforcement of government in order to prop it up because people cannot or will not play by its rules, then in my books, the entire system is the problem, not the people.

Content protection ONLY "screws" people who have the content legitimately.A copyright violator isn't "screwed" by not having access to something they haven't got the right to. The only people who can get screwed are the people who parted with money and may be unable to use the product in a legal, desired way.

Once it gets past the paying customers, the content protection has been removed anyway.(By the way, I originally wrote "owners" in the title but corrected myself...)

I would be very hard-pressed to name even one person that I personally know who has never downloaded a movie, a song, or a game that they did not buy.

What if the movie, the song or the game were so awfully bad that the pirate wasn't even able (or willing) to consume the material? Why should he buy it?

A close analogy is a book store. You walk in, pick a book and start reading. If after a few pages you discover that a hard sci-fi that you were after is, in reality, a pink romance that some other reader put onto the wrong shelf... you just put the book back on the shelf and walk away. The store won't charge you for the book or even for a part of it. The charge comes only if you decide to keep the book.

One may argue that in some traditional sales one the content is sold it won't be taken back (you buy a movie ticket, and that's it - even if you hated the movie.) But in many other traditional sales the content will be taken back - books and games are certainly in this class, movies are available for sampling through trailers, and songs can be heard on radio and in stores before you buy them.

There is also a situation with games when you buy a game and it is unplayable for one reason or another. It may not work on your PC, or it may require dexterity of a 5 y/o child on the PS3, or (like some GTA games) it may require insanely complicated, one-shot-only sequences (everyone raise your hands who remember the RC helicopter with demolition charges) that take 30 minutes to play through with no save and with thousand ways to screw up. If the game was downloaded for free it can be justly tossed, and the developer shouldn't be entitled to any money for producing such a horrible episode without a way to skip it. The dance sequence in GTA San Andreas is another example; was Rockstar totally insane by insisting that only people with a kind of a musical talent should be allowed to proceed through the game?

The only way to stop this would be to start over with a new master key, which would brick every existing HDCP encumbered piece of hardware out there.

"Introducing the new SUPER HD format! We know your 40 year old eyes that need glasses can't tell the difference, but we need to implement a new copy protection scheme, so you all need to rebuy your movie collection on new hardware. Don't need new hardware you say? You do now! We just sent the bricking code to your system when it called home!"

I used to think the future would be all awesome and shiny and utopian. So far I've been dead fucking wrong, so now I'm erring on the side of "extremely cynical and jaded".

The disk drives are also controlled. The disk drive don't let you just get the bits out - they will only give you data if you have a key, etc. I don't know the specifics but this is a *well* thought out system. They have serious control over this shit.

So unless you're going to start writing firmware for blu ray disk drives (which are certainly also protected in some way from attacks like that) i don't see how you're going to get the sequence of bits out.

I can tell you one thing - that kind of hack is nothing I've heard of; its always people getting the key.-Taylor

You would be hard pressed to not even find a PERSON who hasn't put in an attempt to change the law in his/her favour - as that's what elections are about. At least I for one when I have the chance to vote will vote for a person/party that wants laws to work in the same way I want it to.

Not anymore, so you can stop worrying. Your right to free entertainment is now saved by the heroic pirates.

Fuck the freeloading pirates. All I want is to be able to stick a Blu-Ray that I've bought into my Linux box and play it properly. Admittedly I've got it working now, but it certainly wasn't easy at the time (I imagine it's a bit simpler now, but still not trivial).

Car analogy time:
Pretty much anyone I know who has a car and a driver's license has speeded at least once. You can't even pretend that most drivers have speeded, and a lot do so regularly.

I don't see the world or even the car industry clamoring for speed-limited cars though. The speed limit is different in different places because sometimes circumstances allow more or less. So far, it's been more than enough to say "you can't go faster than X here" and do a few spot checks.

For software and music/movies there isn't even a legal requirement. And yet people just put up with it? I don't see the world falling over themselves to buy cars that are limited at the lowest possible speed limit (which is like 5MPH).

GP wasn't attempting to hype up piracy. He was attempting to legitimise it with the "everybody does it" argument. Which he is unable to support with statistics, incidentally. The media we enjoy is funded by those of us who pay for it. The freeloaders do nothing but live off other people.

What if the movie, the song or the game were so awfully bad that the pirate wasn't even able (or willing) to consume the material? Why should he buy it?

Music: There are any number of sites where you can listen to either the whole track or the first thirty seconds to see if you'll like it or not. Are you seriously suggesting that you need to pirate music to know if you'll like it or not?
Movies: Trailers, reviews, friends. Live a little dangerously - take a chance that you might not 100% enjoy a movie before you rent it or go to see it.
Games: Reviews, demos, friends, reasonable educated guesses.
Seriously, your justification for piracy is that the risk of the very occasional lemon that sneaks through is too much? That this is such an impact on life that taking without paying becomes legitimised?

Right, now all I need is for someone to build a complete HDCP stripper, emulate/strip BD+ completely, supply cheap BD-R/RW drives and media, give me a few cheap HDMI cables, a new "HD-ready" TV, and a free voucher for the BluRay version of every movie that I already "own" on DVD and I'm ready to join the HD era.

Hell, I still can't see the extra pixels at my comfortable viewing distance (so I "must be blind"), but I have to get with technology apparently. Apparently my 1440x900x32-bit display, fed via a VGA cable, or SCART, or composite, is "obsolete" and not as good quality as me having a digital cable, despite decades of viewing to the contrary. Apparently being able to watch *anything*, not having to worry about where I bought the disk, not having to fight with new cabling that does a lesser job of simply putting some images on my screen, and being able to backup all my movies is "old-hat". Oh, and I have to pay an extra X amount per month, plus new decoder hardware, in order for them to send me a slightly higher quality signal down my aerial/satellite dish/cable. In the case of FreeView, that means second-generation hardware too. Not wanting that apparently makes me "cheap".

I don't own Blu-ray hardware, don't own "HD ready" kit, and I don't miss it. My normal computer monitors have been "HD" for decades, you just want to add fancy definitions and restrictions so that it's "Movie Industry HD" instead of "HD". When you solve these problems, you'll see the boom in HD adoption that you are desperately hoping for.

Movie companies: The deal in the past was always "I give you about £20, you let me watch that movie wherever I take the disc/tape, on whatever hardware I want, and I promise not to copy it". That sufficed for about 40 years. If you're not willing to keep up your end of the bargain any more, then I won't keep up mine. My morals and job require me not to break the last promise, so I just won't give you the £20 (which is creeping closer to £40 now) OR watch your movie. Deal? Last time I went to the cinema was over a year ago, and that was because I was passing, was bored, was with someone and we needed to fill a few hours until the restaurant opened. The movie we saw was a heap of crap but wasted a few hours. I can't even *name* any movies that come out in 2010. I don't feel I've missed out, though.

It's almost taken as a given that the world would have less creativity without copyright but I do wonder.

I think that's a strawman. I don't think anyone is arguing that there would be less creativity, or else you've really picked the wrong word for what you mean. Ideas flow. What copyright does is enable people (whether the producer(s) directly or an organisation such as a company) to invest effort in bringing that creativity to its limits. Your recipe analogy is a very bad one. It's instructions for how to do something. (And no, that's not the same as software). Writing a novel takes a long time and is a lot of work. Producing a movie, even a cheap one, takes much more money than most individuals have to spare. Leaving aside why should anyone put all that effort or money in to bring a concept to fruition, you can't even solve the how if people aren't willing to commit to paying for viewing / listening to / reading the final work.

Of course no someone is going to complain that composing and cooking a good meal can't be compared to composing and playing a good piece of music because..... well just because!

No, we'll point out that it's a naff comparison. The analogue to someone pirating music is not that person saying: "hey, I like Lady GaGa's new song. Let's also rent a studio, arrange the musicians, record it and mix it". And you must know this.

People are confusing this master key that breaks HDCP, saying it can help decrypt Blu-Ray discs. That's not the case: Blu-Ray is encrypted with AACS, which has a similar concept of device keys derived by a master key. AACS has a mechanism of revoking compromised device keys. Getting the AACS master key would bypass that mechanism, and would be great news.

This key isn't the AACS master key This is an HDCP key, which would allow one to create a "unauthorized" device that can connect to HDCP-encrypted HDMI and succesfully decrypt the HD stream.

HDCP has been known to be nearly broken since 2001 [cryptome.org], in that obtaining the device keys of 40-50 devices is enough to calculate the master key.

The customer is NOT allowed to take advantage of the global market by "outsourcing" THEIR suppliers of media by ordering from a different, cheaper region.

And if you've ever bought used textbooks on the Internet, you'll probably quickly discover what a sweet discount you can get when the global market stays global for you. I've bought plenty of (English-language) textbooks that were originally sold to the Indian subcontinent; they're exactly the same between the covers as the American editions but priced quite differently, and you can often save some good money. (Competitive pricing keeps the prices all pretty much the same, but the foreign editions are often the cheapest, sometimes by as much as $10-$20. And I'd have to guess that they pull down the prices of the other editions.)

The catch is that there's a small but visible red box announcing that the book was for such-and-such countries and that any sale outside those countries is "UNAUTHORIZED"—which is true, but it refers to the publishers' contracts with their own retailers. They indeed do not authorize secondhand sale to the U.S., but that doesn't make it the least bit illegal or unethical. (They also don't authorize me to scribble in the margin or dip the book in peanut butter or whatever, but who's asking their permission? After the publisher sells the book to a contract-bound vendor, who sells it to a private citizen, the publisher's power to authorize anything is null.) But they sure as hell don't mind letting some Westerner assume that they'd be buying stolen property, so they're no clearer than they need to be about whether such an "UNAUTHORIZED" sale is actually dishonest.

The parent poster is absolutely right about what the region codes do: divide the market into pieces where each one can be charged a different price, while keeping the pieces from trading with each other and benefiting from a free secondary market as I did with my books. To criminalize breaking the codes has no purpose other than to help publishers make more money in a sickeningly anti-capitalistic way. Good for whoever cracked the codes: they've done something for the little guy and his ability to buy and sell his own property like a capitalist. (And perhaps you thought that "capitalist" always meant "pro-corporation"...)

Writing a novel takes a long time and is a lot of work. Producing a movie, even a cheap one, takes much more money than most individuals have to spare. Leaving aside why should anyone put all that effort or money in to bring a concept to fruition, you can't even solve the how if people aren't willing to commit to paying for viewing / listening to / reading the final work.

Frankly, I'm sure that if Paulo Coelho publicized that because copyright no longer exists he needs his fans to finance the writing of his next book, he'd manage to raise enough money to get by. And some people would still pay him for his works. I'm not sure how much more of less money he'd raise this way, than he raises now, however. Independent movie developers would probably be releasing short clips of the beginning of their movie on places like YouTube and gathering contributions to finance the rest of project.

Yes, as the GP already stated, things would be different. Very different. For example, the minute CreativeGuyNo1 releases the first chapter of his book, there would be nothing preventing CreativeGuyNo2 from publishing a competing second chapter, trying to steal away the audience from CreativeGuyNo1. People would probably coin new words for concepts like "creator who released a good teaser but never actually paid back anything for the flood of money he got to continue" and "someone who is great at polishing the great ideas of others but has few original ideas of his own".

Personally, I think it would be ideal if there would be some kind of compromise --- say about 20 years of protection, with little punishment for not-for-profit infringement (the definition of profit not including receiving other copyrighted works). Unfortunately, I don't have billions of dollars of income out of which to allocate funding for lobbyists. So the chance I'll see it in my lifetime is minuscule.

The rights in question are fair use / fair dealings rights. You have the right, for example, to extract short clips from a video and quote them in commentary and so on, for example including screen captures in reviews. DRM on BluRays prevents you from exercising this right, among others. In some countries, you have the explicit right to format shift, which DRM also prevents.

DRM is vigilante action by the publishers, and it should be treated as any other vigilante action.

I'm not a lawyer, but in some countries, copyright law does indeed regard "fair use" (or whatever the local term is called) as a specific right of users that goes along with the rights that creators have in copyright law. This was recently clarified in Canada by the Supreme Court, for example, where the decision refers to the exceptions in copyright law as "a user's right" [wikipedia.org]. The two sides of copyright law (the limitations and exceptions) are meant to be complementary rights. If a creator of a work sticks a copyright message on their work, they get certain rights that give them limited control over the material, and users of that material get certain rights that are exceptions to the control that the rights-holders have. To put it more specifically, in many countries users have the right to copy short excerpts of copyrighted material for purposes of criticism, education, scholarly research, and so forth, regardless of the wishes of the copyright holder. DRM and other protection schemes restrict user rights regardless of the intended usage. I suppose you could say the rights are still there, but you can't exercise them legally if there are laws against circumvention of DRM.

Now, if your point is that none of these "rights" in copyright are inherent rights in the same sense as, say, human rights, that's fine. But keep in mind that user rights in copyright law are essentially exceptions to the artificial limitations on copying imposed by copyright, so it could be argued that when people exercise legal exceptions to copyright law (such as "fair use"), they are, in fact, exercising their ordinary human rights to do whatever the heck they want. It's copyright limitations that are artificial. The fact remains that user rights have as much validity as the rights of the copyright holder regardless of whether you call either of them "rights".

Incidentally, the reason why your quotation of Inigo Montoya from one of William Goldman's copyrighted works [wikipedia.org] is not a violation of copyright law is due to the rights you have as a user.

In the example of a chef "copying" another chefs recipe, you're right in that the world would be a worse place if we couldn't use one anothers recipes. It was also be ridiculous to think that a hairdresser could "copy" another persons hairstyle because it had been copyrighted. The difference here is that the copied recipe and the copied haircuts are not copies, but attempts at imitation. The amount of work required of an individual to produce the imitation would be approximately equal to the work put in by the original creator. This is not the case when you copy a film or album.

The distribution companies have invested heavily in coming up with ways to make the duplication of a single recording as easy as possible for themselves in order to spend less effort duplicating and more money distributing. The problem lies in the fact that when we as consumers buy a copy of that media, we are not buying the content itself, but the distribution media it comes on along with a right to enjoy the content it contains.

The "Media" industry (and really, they should be called the "Content Distribution" industry) want us to buy more "Media" containing the same content as previous "Media" we have purchased. Having once paid for the right to enjoy that content, why the fuck should we as individuals be forced to pay to enjoy that same content again and again, when it's plain to see that by doing so, we are not supporting the people that create the content, but only those who profit by copying and distributing it. They are the fucking pirates! And they don't like it when someone muscles in on their turf. Fuck 'em!

Uhhhh...I hate to break the new to you dude, but this "cracking" stuff? Damned useful to those of us who AREN'T pirates. Want an example? I have a lovely complete collection of Joss Whedon's series right in front of me on a shelf, with a cool Buffy and Spike collectible figure on each side for bookends given to me by my late sister. Now here I am, with frankly an assload of HDD space at nearly 1Tb, yet thanks to their DMCA bullshit I can't just walk into Walmart and buy software that'll let me rip these discs, which I fricking paid nearly a grand for, to my HDD. Instead I'm supposed to break them open and go through the hassle of loading them each time I want to watch an episode of Buffy or firefly. That sucks! WTF is the point of having all this space if I'm not allowed to put my fricking media on it??

Uh, I hate to break it to you, "dude", but your example here is stupid.

Arguing why you can't put your DVD or Blu-Ray collection on a hard drive is about as pointless as arguing why there is no football dispenser in your new car. Point being, it was never designed to.. Not by the manufacturer of the HDTV. Not by the manufacturer of the Blu-Ray disc. Not by the manufacturer of the Blu-Ray player. All arguments regarding "fair use" aside for a moment, I fail to see why this continues to be a valid argument for people who own both the movie and the player. Load the disc already and just watch the damn movie. Not every product in this world is designed to work around you. If you don't like the way certain technology works, then don't fucking buy it.

No, you have it backwards. It's the media producers who live off other people.

Yep. Just the other day, a "media producer" came to my home and ate all my food. Sarcastic? Yes, a little. But providing me with something that I want in exchange for an agreed price is not "living off me". If someone publishes a book or releases a movie and says they're selling it for X amount of money, that's my choice. Are they offering me something I think is worth X money, yes or no. If yes, I buy it. If no, I don't. If that's living off other people, then so is pretty much any job, and many much more so than the "media producer".

Is it not they, who expect to profit forever, without bound, from a limited amount of work? They, who don't want to accept the market as it exists, and want to impose their own rules on the general population, so that they can live off them without effort?

Wow. That's some dramatic prose in defense of taking for free what others who paid to produce. It's pirates "who don't want to accept the market as it exists" as they are the ones bypassing the market and setting their own conditions on others without that party's agreement. A "market" is agreed exchange. If author Jane offers her work for amount X, that imposes nothing on you. You are free to negotiate or walk away, and that is the market. If some freeloader says to Jane: you have no ability to negotiate with me - I'm taking this and there's nothing you can do about it, then that meets your flowery language of "imposing their own rules" does it not? That meets your definition of "living off them without effort" does it not?

We owe them nothing.

Someone produces a book, movie, song, game that you enjoy and you say you "owe them nothing".

to encourage these lazy persons to produce our music

The "lazy persons produce our music", eh? You see no contradiction in that sentence? You condemn as lazy people who write novels, record albums, film movies, develop games. You have no conception of how much work or expense any of these things involve, clearly. If it's so trivial, and you're so not lazy, why don't you make your own novels, albums, movies and games? Surely not because that would require effort / money / expertise.

but they have abused our trust and taken it to the extreme.

How, in precise words, has someone abused your trust? Because I've always been under the impression that movies / novels / music / games, were being sold to me. I was never "trusting" that these things were all being thrust into my hands for free only to suddenly find that my trust was broken because someone asked for money as I left the shop or clicked the "Confirm Order" button.

They deserve no pity. The problem is not solved by forcing the population to spend all their extra money on copies of bits

Yes. They are demons, irrevocably damned. We must not pity people who spend their time or money on producing things.

The problem is not solved by forcing the population to spend all their extra money on copies of bits.

Disingenuous in the extreme. When was the last time anyone forced you to spend your money on a movie or TV show or a novel or whatever? Really - when were you forced to spend this money?

It is solved by introducing sane copyright law, that brings balance back into the game.

After the illogical, unsupported and self-contradicting post you just made, you have as much right to talk about "sane" as King Herod does to talk about "child care"

Intel is manning up and admitting that something terrible just happened. It is the smart thing to do. If they had hemmed and hawed and delayed admitting the key was genuine then all their customers who had bought in on this DRM scheme would have gotten pissed off and felt jerked around.

Look at the metric shitload of bad press BP got when they tried to lie and evade regarding their recent oil leak. I believe the people responsible for that are no longer with the company.

It is interesting that someone would question why on Earth Intel would step up and do the right thing that will be best for the company in the coming weeks and months. I think this is because we have come to expect large corporations to act with all the integrity and intelligence of a retarded dinosaur after it has had its brains knocked out by a piece of asteroid shrapnel. Apparently real engineers continue to work at Intel and for some unknown reason, at least one of was placed in a position of authority.

Actually, the expansion of corporate monopolies by use of DRM and DMCA restricts what used to be inalienable rights of both artists and users far more that most people imagine. It is a very dangerous situation right now. Anything to weaken DRM and DMCA is good, at least until the the political process starts working for the people again.

Once we start talking about parallel imports, we have a problem. Intellectual property is only as valuable as the customer is willing to pay. But at the same time, it has base costs. If we talk about academic textbooks, the customer in India, Kenya or Peru is not willing or capable of paying as much as the customer in the US or the UK. So we cut the price in their region so that they can afford it, and this gives them access to education. If import protections didn't exist, the publishers would have a straight choice between losing their developed-world profits by selling at developing-world rates, or losing their developing-world profits by selling at developed-world rates. The big money's in the developed word, so if we were to ban import protection on IP works, education in the developing world would suffer.

Of course, the opposite is true in the case of Hollywood cr*p -- if that wasn't available, education would improve, but you've got to take the rough with the smooth.

Has teaching your children not to destroy your stuff really become that hard?

The problem is that their parent, the television, hasn't yet grown arms and legs. When it does it can settle in to do some real parenting. Until then there is no substitute for watching your children. Or, you know, storing things out of their reach.

That is the flaw in your argument. The content providers have the right to control the distribution of their product, and have a monopoly on the profits from their product, but they don't have the right to limit my fair use of the product. The real pirates are the guys that are copying the DVDs bit for bit and selling them. This is not the same as ripping it to your hard drive to watch on your computer. No one is arguing against punishing those that are profiting from other people's works.

The argument is simple: Once I buy the media, I should be able to watch it any way I want as long as I don't infringe on their rights to profit from it. This means I am not supposed to sell copies, I'm not supposed to show it in a theatre or pub or other public venue. Whether I watch it on my laptop, TV, or work computer doesn't affect them as I have already purchased the item. If I want to include a short clip for commentary or criticism on my blog, the law says I have the absolute RIGHT to do so, but the technology effectively blocks me from doing this.

You are worried about THEIR rights, which are based upon the (valid) idea that they have the right to exclusively profit from their work. Once I have purchased that DVD or BD, they no longer have a vested interest in the profits of that one disk, they already have it.

I don't have a blue-ray player yet, so this is just about DVDs for me.

I rip the DVDs I own because so many of the DVDs are filled with tons of crap that frequently you are not allowed to skip through or over. Commercials. FBI warnings. And frequently, many of the main menus are actually a little animated "movie" before it "solidifies" into the actual menu, and you have to wait for it to finish doing its song and dance before you can hit play.

It's easier to rip the content to a hard drive, and then when I sit down to watch a movie it goes straight to the movie.

Another thing that's great about ripping movies, especially children movies, is I can set up a play list on the computer and let it go all day long for the kids, without having to stop what I'm doing to change out discs.

Before people freak out about the "all day long" we only let our kids watch TV on the weekends, and seldom do they actually watch the TV all day long.

No, DRM is correct: Digital Restrictions on Media, as someone here has named it before. It fits a whole lot better than digital rights management, because it doesn't manage digital rights, it adds priveleges that the "content creator" has no right to, while restricting the rights of the person who bought the item.

The DMCA is illegal. Why you ask? Because it illegally attempts to extend copyright to infinity. How you ask? By not allowing for the encryption to fall away after a certain date.Ever try bumping your system clock ahead 100 to 200 years and try reading a dvd or blu-ray? yup - it's still encrypted.

Any device or software that causes an illegal activity is (to use their terms and definitions) is illegal, therefor the DMCA and with it any form of encryption without time based unlock is illegal.

Your negativity is not funny, not insightful, and definitely not helping.

When the copyright expires, and it will, I should not have to spend time cracking a protection scheme in order to access public domain works. Creators have a temporary monopoly in exchange for agreeing to give it to the public at some time.

At the time of creation, the creator has the right to copy the work, or allow copying, and I do not. At the time of expiration, the right to copy passes from the creator's hands into mine. There should be no lock which prevents me from exercising my fully legal right at that time.

If you're feeling like adding something about effectively perpetual copyright due to extension, that's fine, but know that copyrights at least in USA are constitutionally limited. It might be a thousand or a million years, but when that time comes the Constitution says it's public domain.

I have seen arguments that, while public domain status is guaranteed there is no requirement that the work be accessible. That might be true. However, I can easily see a court battle which establishes that locking away expired works is abuse of copyright. Unfortunately we won't be able to have that established for 100 years, until someone shows actual harm, and therefore standing to sue. Ultimately, I believe it will be illegal to lock away content due to agreeing upon entering the copyright protection agreement one also agrees to its public domain status once expired. Either that, or the Library of Congress exemptions will water down DRM breaking enough that it's irrelevant. That has already begun.

It's not like a company can claim they were surprised that copyright is limited. Until the US constitution is changed, the *IAA have to accept that their works will be public domain at some point.

Let's say the KEY is the score (A,B,G#, etc) of a song converted into a HEX string. The song and score are copyrighted but the FACT that the HEX string created from the score cannot be copyrighted. The HEX string (the Key) is still just a number.

Not that I don't agree a lot of parents are lazy assholes, but you'd be surprised what those little kids can get themselves into. Sometimes you just don't think about it. It's kind of (excuse the comparison) when you have a dog and you leave something on the counter, come back later, and they've ripped it to shreds. Yeah, you could have put it way up on a shelf high as hell, but you just didn't think about it, you were in a rush, etc. Shit happens. It's not always a lazy parent and unless you're literally hovering around watching every movement the kid makes, that kind of thing will happen. It only take a few seconds for them to get a hold of that case and rip it open, unfortunately.

I'm not a parent but I have 2 much much younger siblings (I'm 24 and the older one just hit 10 years old) so I've seen my share of this stuff like any parent. I was really vigilant (most people are especially watchful when it isn't their own kids) so it's not like I just threw them in a room to watch TV and ignored them.

THANK YOU! It is nice to see some real geeks still come here! I've been messing with media and HTPCs since before that word existed, when I'd spend half the night in DOS stripping a Win9x install to scrape every ounce of performance so I could record MPEG 2 streams with an ISA capture card. I think the point that everyone is missing, and why this is frankly a dangerous precedent to allow to stand, is that I don't want the cartels help to convert as a geek I can figure that out myself just fine I just don't want the government using their power to stop me from tinkering.

Imagine what the world would be like if MSFT paid the government back in the day to have creating a "non approved" OS made illegal? Imagine if using GNUTools or Linux was a crime? Don't think that can happen? Just look up things like trusted computing to see that is exactly the kind of BS they wanted to hoist on us in the past. Do we really want our society to be nothing but passive consumers, who take whatever junk the cartels hand us and blindly do as they say? Already there is plenty of things that could make the average Joe's life better, like an easy to use HTPC that rips your DVDs to the drive automatically, but they can't be bought. Not because they don't work, but because they do and the cartels have paid the government to ban them.

In a way we geeks are the canary in the coal mine, as it is WE that think up "why it would be cool if..." and make it happen. We are the dreamer of dreams, and all I'm asking for is the iron boot of the government not to crush those dreams and ideas before they bare fruit. remember folks if the cartels had their way there wouldn't have even been VHS or Betamax, as it was "nothing but a tool for piracy!". Yeah, a tool which ended up making them billions.

Much like a gun is a tool. You can use it for target practice, hunting, home defense - and murder. The tool doesn't get to decide how it is used. The user does. The tool is blameless.

Much like a fully automatic weapon. Much like an atomic bomb. Much like lockpicks.

Tools can be and are regulated based on their *primary* function, regardless of whether there are other, legitimate uses. This holds true for both physical objects and intangibles like software.

Now, you could go on to argue that the primary use of a firearm is to kill, which is true, but it's also the only tool that's specifically addressed by the U.S. Constitution, which makes it a unique case, and is probably the sole reason it's still legal to own one.

The big money's in the developed word, so if we were to ban import protection on IP works, education in the developing world would suffer.

The alternative happening now is that US engineering students subsidize Indian engineering students by paying higher education costs, then end up in direct competition with them in the global marketplace, except that the US engineering student has five or six figures in student loans to pay off.

I don't know about you, but "will cause United States to have better schools than India and China" sounds like a plus in my book.